Page 75 of The Fanged One

It was already happening before the shade finished talking. Linnea had not taken a single step, and the group was coming apart around her, each of them drifting off in a different direction like leaves in the wind.

Von sat on a bench across from a teenage boy with pink hair, the two of them instantly deep in some story that had Von's hands dancing.

A cry went up near the far wall. Two people had risen from a corner table, a lean man and a strongly built woman, their arms already open. Ciara was across the hall at a dead run with Layla half a step behind her. They hit the embrace all together, a tangle of held faces and gripped hands, and the laughter that came off them was real and helpless. From the shouts, Linnea realized they were Ciara's parents. She could see the hunter training in their movements and Lachlan's smile on the woman's face.

Something in Linnea's chest unknotted a little at the touching moment. Ciara and Layla deserved to have a good memory of Niflheim. Somebody had to walk out of this hall with a gift, and the animal part of her that sensed danger was already certain it wouldn't be her.

She turned to find Fenris, to say so, and the words died in her mouth.

Tor had gone rigid halfway down the hall, the whole great bulk of him was motionless, his eyes fixed on a big silver-haired man rising slowly off a bench by the fire. Linnea's stomach turned to water. She would have known that man in any crowd in any world, the set of those shoulders, the cruel patience in the way he stood and waited.

Skari.

Tor turned on his heel and walked straight for the door, fast, his hands in fists. Arne went after him without a word. Skari smiled maliciously and followed them both out into the gray, unhurried, certain of being obeyed.

Linnea did what she'd learned to do before she could write her own name. She stepped in close behind Fenris and made herself small, putting his body between her and her father, forcing herself not to bolt. Skari never glanced her way. He never did, unless he was looking for something to break, and he had Tor for that. She had never mattered enough to scan for.

Her father went out the door, and for one breath, she let herself believe the worst of this place had already passed her by.

Beside her, Fenris stopped walking, his attention fixed on something halfway down the hall. Linnea followed his line of sight to a small table set for two.

A beautiful woman sat there alone, hands folded on the wood. She had long, dark hair and skin pale as ivory in the firelight.

"Sunniva," Fenris said, so quietly Linnea almost missed it.

The name went down her like a stone down a well. This was his human wife. The one who had come before her and meant so much that he had willingly been bound to protect her.

Across the hall, the woman raised her eyes and found him. She looked at Fenris for a long moment with a face Linnea couldn't read. She gave him a small, grave nod and lifted one hand a few inches off the table in invitation.

Fenris crossed the hall to her without a word or one glance back at Linnea, as though she had stopped existing the moment that woman lifted her eyes. He lowered himself onto the bench across from Sunniva, and he bowed his head as they began to speak in voices pitched too low for the hall to carry.

Linnea's wolf, who had walked into the literal underworld with her teeth out, lay down and curled into a tight ball.

You're being ridiculous. She is dead, and you are not. This could be a gift to him, too, like the Ironwoods are getting, she tried telling herself. It was foolish to be jealous of a dead woman.

Linnea sat down hard at the nearest empty table and tried to focus on the intricate knotwork carved on the roof beams, but her eyes kept drifting.

Fenris's back was all she could see, the tilt of his head, angled down toward Sunniva, listening intently. Sunniva reached across the table and took his hand in both of hers. Her mouth moved on and on, her thumb tracing slowly over the back of Fenris's knuckles. Fenris didn't pull away, did not lift his head, did nothing at all but hold the hand of the wife he had loved and lost.

Some cruel part of Linnea made her keep looking. This was the real woman Fenris loved and chose. Whatever Linnea had been to him in the warm and the dark, it was not this, and it was never going to be.

She had let him hold her last night. She had handed him the worst memory she owned. The whole time there had been a Sunniva-shaped hollow in him that a girl like her was never going to fill. She had known better than to forget that.

Linnea dropped her eyes to her own knees, because looking at them was its own kind of bleeding. She was concentrating hard on the weave of her leggings when the bench across from her creaked under a new weight.

She looked up at the woman across the table. She had Linnea's eyes set in a face older and harder than the one in Linnea's earliest memories and still, unmistakably, the face she had spent her childhood looking up at.

Her mother, Inga, folded her hands on the table, looked at Linnea with mild interest, and gave her a smile with nothing behind it.

"There you are," she said like they had arranged to meet. "I wondered what you would grow into." Her gaze went down Linnea and back up, taking inventory. "Not much, I see."

Linnea opened her mouth, and nothing came out. She had a lifetime of things she wanted to say to this woman. Not one would come. Her throat had closed the way it used to close when she was small and had learned that talking back only ever made things worse.

Inga didn't need her to talk. She had come to deliver something, and she said it the way another woman might read out a shopping list.

"You'll want to know why I left. I'll tell you, since we're here," Inga said plainly. "Your father was a reason. A person can only be hit so many times before leaving becomes less about cowardice and more about sense. That was only half of it, though, and I think you have always known that."

Linnea didn't say anything. She was too shocked to move, to fight back, to fathom seeing Inga again.